On a recent morning, I indulged one of my worst habits—checking Twitter on my phone

immediately upon waking up. When I turned the screen off, I was alarmed to discover that I
could no longer see out of my right eye. I picked up my phone again, this time in a panic, to
Google my symptoms, and quickly learned that I had experienced what medical researchers
have called “transient smartphone blindness.” It can occur when you look at a bright screen
while lying down with only one eye open. It’s one of many effects that constant engagement
with screens could be having on our eyes, which together produce anxiety about the negative
physical effects of contemporary technologies.

Before smartphones and handheld devices, that anxiety was directed at televisions. From the
time of their commercialization, people worried about the potential harms of the device: the
harms of placing their face close to the screen, of watching for many hours at a time, of the
appliance’s position at the center of domestic life. People still worry about spending too
much time in front of a television (much of the recent focus has been on the effects on
children and weight gain). Samsung even warned of possible health risks from watching its 3-
D TVs—pregnant women and the elderly were advised not to watch 3-D sets at all.

But in the history of television, the gravest and most all-encompassing danger from the
proximity of human bodies to a screen came in the 1950s and ’60s. In retrospect, that period
might also serve as the explanation for why those of us of a certain age can recall the urgency
with which our parents forbade us from sitting too close to the TV. Color sets, the new
technology of the time, were found to be radioactive.

Since the 1940s, there had been long-standing concerns about radiation leaks from black-and-
white picture tubes. But it wasn’t until 1967, when routine testing revealed that specific large-
screen models of GE color sets were emitting “X-radiation in excess of desirable levels,” that
there seemed to be any real evidence of such a risk. Scientists speculated that the high voltage
required by color sets was partly to blame.

3-D TV is dead.

Initially, the radiation concern was limited to a single model, but by late in the year it became
clear that televisions from almost every manufacturer were potentially affected—as many as
112,000 sets.

The response to the concern was swift. By late July of 1967, television-industry
representatives were brought before a congressional committee, which eventually proposed a
federal radiation-regulation bill (which became the 1968 Radiation Control for Health and
Safety Act). Further testing was conducted by the National Center for Radiological Health
(NCRH) and the Public Health Service into early 1968. The surgeon general eventually
issued a statement, saying that testing showed that this low level of radiation posed only a
small risk to any one set-owner’s health as long as he or she was watching a set in “normal
viewing” conditions. That was understood to be maintaining “at least a six-foot viewing
distance from the front of the screen and [avoiding] prolonged exposure at the sides, rear, or
underneath a set.”

According to the NCRH, the leakage beam in most of the problematic sets was directed
downward “in a thin crescent pattern.” It therefore didn’t pose a direct line of contact with a
viewer’s body as long as the set was placed on the floor instead of on a high shelf. Color-set
owners were also instructed to keep their distance from the set at all times and were warned
against tinkering with its internals to avoid being in direct contact with the radiation beam.

The public was well aware of the potentially devastating health effects of intense radiation
exposure from atomic bombs or nuclear catastrophes. But the slower impacts of lower levels
of radiation were less well known. Much of the discussion in the press and in congressional
hearings addressed what could happen from exposure to low-level radiation leaks over time,
like the ones from color televisions. Concerns about damage to reproductive organs and about
the genetic mutation of future generations were particularly common.

The anxiety and dread around radioactive materials, along with the role that nuclear weapons
played in the Cold War, would certainly have given weight to the image of a slow and
possibly deadly leak coming out of the home appliance your family gathered around most
regularly. Color television, in this instance, was not just bringing images of the contemporary
world into the home; it was also physically manifesting one of that world’s most pressing and
feared perils.

“Radioactive” color television sets continued to make headlines through the end of the 1960s,
but there was also acknowledgement that the threat of harm had likely been exaggerated. In
1969, Newsday reported that W. Roger Ney, the executive director of the National Council on
Radiation Protection, had called the amounts of radiation coming from the sets “too little to
have a measurable effect on human beings.” He dismissed a proposal by two New York
congressmen to have manufacturers “go into homes to test all of the nation’s 15 million color
sets and to install radiation devices in them,” adding, “I’d sure like to see that amount of
effort put into things that are more clearly dangerous.”